Symbols, Serfdom, and Peasant Factions

A Response to Hermann Rebel

Bibliographic Data

ID11524874
AuthorsDavid M Luebke (0000-0002-3813-6582, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume34
Issue3
Pages357-382
Publication date2001-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1163/15691610152959163
OpenAlexW2093038859
LanguageEN
References cited9

The main fault that Hermann Rebel finds with the practitioners of “symbolic actionism” is a tendency to naturalize systems of power and cultural domination and to treat subaltern groups as if they were unable to examine their position in them critically. This tendency in turn causes symbolic actionists to misrecognize self-interested maneuvers within existing systems of domination as counterhegemonic symbolic manipulations. The overall effect of symbolic-actionist analysis, therefore, is to “downplay the degradation and terror experienced by victims of exploitation and persecution.” Rebel's view of such relationships could hardly differ more. As he sees it, hegemonic forces were so disruptive that to speak of peasant societies as culturally autonomous and of peasants as historical “agents” is at best self-deceiving

Aesthetics · Hegemony · Peasant · Persecution · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Serfdom · Sociology · Subaltern · Symbolic power · The Symbolic · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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